A Little Friday Graffiti

The other day I sat in on an online dotBrighton talk on openFrameworks by James Alliban. One of the things he happened to mention in the hour or so long talk, was Graffiti Markup Language. Now this wasn’t the first I’d heard of the subject – I heard the term before in a session at some conference or other. On average, as my wife will attest to, I’d say I have to hear things 2 or 3 times before I start to listen. In any case, I took this recent exposure to the term as an excuse to actually do some googling and see what it’s all about.

For anyone who doesn’t know, Graffiti Markup Language (or GML) is basically just a structured xml format used “for archiving gestural graffiti motion data into a text file.” In a nutshell, gml contains a whole slew of pt (‘point’) nodes and the amount of time it takes to get from one of those nodes to the next. Each point represents a x, y, z coordinate of an end stroke of a graffiti tag.

So, just for kicks, I strolled over to this joint, downloaded 6 .gml files and started fooling around with Seb Lee-Delisle’s Graphics3D and my own Bayer Mosaic PixelBender filter and came up with the little thing below. It just loops through the 6 tags, drawing them out in 3D. Just an interesting way of looking at graffiti and killing a Friday lunch hour. Mouse around to rotate the object.

For those interested, the entire script is posted down below.

ActionScript

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/**

* Copyright (c) 2010 Devon O. Wolfgang

*

* Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a copy

* of this software and associated documentation files (the "Software"), to deal

* in the Software without restriction, including without limitation the rights